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This video is called Vows Of Silence — Marcial Maciel, the Legion of Christ, and Regnum Christi.

From Associated Press:

Legion orders images of disgraced founder removed

December 13, 2010 – 11:18am

MEXICO CITY (AP) – The Legionaries of Christ is ordering images of its disgraced founder removed from its buildings worldwide as part of Vatican-mandated reforms.

The conservative order says photographs showing the late Rev. Marciel Maciel alone or with the pope must be removed from its installations.

Maciel founded the influential Legion in Mexico in 1941. He was dogged for years by allegations that he abused seminarians. But it was only after his 2008 death that the order admitted the allegations were true and that Maciel had fathered three children.

The Legion also announced on its website Monday that it was prohibiting the celebration of Maciel’s birthday. It also banned the sale of Maciel’s writings inside Legion centers.

The Irish government has rejected calls for the Murphy Commission to investigate every diocese in Ireland for child abuse following the sensational findings in Wexford and Dublin and major revelations expected in the just concluded investigation into the Cloyne diocese: here.

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One of the biggest leaks in U.S. military history has exposed several cover-ups over the war in Afghanistan, including the deaths of hundreds of civilians. The whistle-blowing website, Wikileaks, handed over 90-thousand classified documents to British, American and German newspapers.

The Dutch economics student Sebastian Moeys has developed a WikiLeaks game and has put on his own website. The game has been played nearly one million times by now.

In the game, the player, playing Julian Assange, tries, without being seen, to download secret documents from the computer of President Obama. Obama sits behind his desk, but occasionally falls asleep.

Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, is confronting a growing backlash within her own party, with more Labor MPs yesterday attacking the Prime Minister’s language and declaring their support for WikiLeaks’s founder Julian Assange and free speech: here.

TIME readers want WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange to win person of the year: here.

A giant predatory theropod dinosaur, similar in size and stature to Tyrannosaurus rex, has been identified by palaeontologists. The new dinosaur, named Zhuchengtyrannus magnus, probably stood four metres tall, was 11 metres long and weighed around six tonnes: here.

Primate expert and president of Conservation International, Russ Mittermeier, first spotted the lemur during an expedition in 1995, but has confirmed its existence whilst filming the documentary this year, when he and his colleagues captured and took blood samples from the small primate before returning it to its forest home.

Genetic testing of these samples should confirm whether the animal is indeed a new species.

Dr Mittermeier, however, is already convinced that it is.

Forked-marked lemurs belong to the genus, or group of species, called Phaner. If confirmed as a new species, this would be only the fifth member of that group.

Following the call

Dr Mittermeier first saw the squirrel-sized creature in Daraina, a protected area in the northeast of Madagascar.

“I was surprised to see a fork-marked lemur there, since this animal had not yet been recorded from the region,” he recalled.

“I immediately knew that it was likely a new species to science, but didn’t have the time to follow up until now.”

So in October of this year, the researcher led an expedition – including geneticist Ed Louis from the Omaha Zoo and a film crew from the BBC’s Natural History Unit – to the same area, where they managed to track down the animal. …

FORK-MARKED FACTS

Phaner lemurs have a black, Y-shaped line that starts above each eye and joins together as a single line on the top of the head, creating the fork that gives these animals their common name
Their large hands and feet help them grip onto trees
The lemurs vocalise with the loud, high-pitched night-time call
They tend to run rapidly along horizontal tree branches and to jump from one branch to the next without pausing
Their diet consists of a high proportion of gums exuded by trees and nectar from flowers
A long tongue enables them to slurp up nectar and a specialised toothcomb acts as a scraping tool to bite into tree bark

Like its larger relatives Archaeoindris and Palaeopropithecus, Babakotia was a specialized type of primate known as a “sloth lemur,” a ponderous, long-legged, sloth-like mammal that lived high up in trees, where it subsisted on leaves, fruits and seeds. No one knows exactly when Babakotia went extinct, but it seems to have been around the time the first human settlers arrived on Madagascar, between 1,000 and 2,000 years ago: here.

A new species of Paretroplus (Teleostei: Cichlidae: Etroplinae) from NE Madagascar: here.

In an effort to help address this critical need for data about the diversity and distribution of life on our planet, scientists from the California Academy of Sciences have spent the past year exploring some of the most diverse—and often most threatened—habitats on Earth, searching for new species and creating comprehensive biodiversity maps. In 2010, these scientists have added 113 new relatives to our family tree, including 83 arthropods, 20 fishes, four corals, two sea slugs, two plants, one reptile, and one fossil mammal. The new species were described by a dozen scientists from the California Academy of Sciences along with several dozen international collaborators: here.

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US president Barack Obama made his first direct remarks about the recent WikiLeaks release, calling the publication of the documents “deplorable,” as the US continues to seek a means of prosecuting the organization’s founder: here.

This video from the USA is called DynCorp, US tax funds child prostitution – Operation Leakspin.

The worldwide witch-hunt against the jailed founder of WikiLeaks data-journalist site, Julian Assange, an Australian national, has received rabid support in French political circles. Some of the most poisonous statements have come from the bourgeois “left” Socialist Party (PS) and its middle class ex-radical satellites, such as the New Anti-capitalist Party (NPA) of Olivier Besancenot and Lutte Ouvrière (Workers’ Struggle, LO): here.

A special forces unit completing an early morning raid on Saturday gunned down seven men in the village of Rohani Baba, in Afghanistan’s eastern Paktia province. Abdul Rahman Mangal, the deputy governor of Paktia, told CNN that the victims were road construction workers. A press release by the US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) alleges that the men were employees of a private security company.

Details of the incident remain sketchy, but the ISAF statement claims that its troops had detained an alleged arms dealer and had moved on to “investigate suspected insurgent activity” at a housing compound in Rohani Baba. The seven men, some of whom were allegedly armed, were sitting in and around an SUV. After they were ordered in Pashtun to leave the compound, one man, carrying an AK-47, began to walk toward the occupation troops. He was shot dead. Some of the other men returned fire and in the resulting gun battle, all seven were killed.

The killings point again to the murderous character of the operations being conducted by the special forces units scouring Afghanistan. The underlying philosophy of these operations is to shoot first and ask questions later. Since September, ISAF claims it has killed or captured over 368 insurgent “leaders”. American commanders boasted last month that 24 rank-and-file insurgents are also being killed or captured every 24 hours by Special Forces. It is unknown how many were actually “Taliban” and how many, like the seven men in Rohani Baba, were simply people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

While ISAF claims it will “investigate” the killings, the activities of what can only be called death squads are aimed at terrorising and intimidating the Afghan population into submitting to the occupation.

News of the massacre provoked a demonstration in Gardez, the capital of Paktia. Hundreds of men erected barricades of burning tyres, chanted “Death to America” and anti-Afghan government slogans and burned an effigy of Barack Obama. Shots were exchanged between Afghan police and armed protestors. A local doctor told Al Jazeera that six civilians and two police had been hospitalised with wounds.

The incident in Paktia was just one of a series over the past 72 hours that have claimed the lives of dozens of Afghan civilians, as well as insurgents and US troops.

Robert Naiman, Truthout: “On Thursday, the Obama administration announced the results of its promised ‘review’ of Afghanistan policy, a year after President Obama acceded to the demands of the Pentagon to send 30,000 more troops. The top line of the story the administration is presenting is ‘progress’ and the main evidence for that ‘progress’ is the say-so of General Petraeus and his subordinates. But the collective assessment of 16 US intelligence agencies gives a very different picture. In particular, the intelligence agencies say Pakistan remains unwilling to stop providing support and sanctuary for members of the Afghan Taliban: here.

Ralph Lopez, Truthout: “A Congressional subcommittee has reached the conclusion that the Pentagon is knowingly providing major support for the Taliban, ignoring hundreds of complaints from Afghan trucking contractors who are being forced to pay massive ‘protection payments’ to insurgents in order to avoid attacks on convoys carrying US military supplies to American bases. The Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, chaired by Rep. John Tierney, interviewed dozens of witnesses in Dubai, including contracting officers of the 484th Joint Movement Control Battalion and Afghan truck contractors who ‘self-reported.’ The truck contractors who self-reported had already complained to the US military about the protection payments to insurgents. The committee gathered over 25,000 pages of documents. The report is entitled ‘Warlord, Inc.'”: here.

A Record 60 Percent of Americans Say the War in Afghanistan Has Not Been Worth Fighting: here.